Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 by Yasmin Saikia (review)

Yasmin Saikia’s book is a good example of an oral history study that serves several purposes concomitantly; for example, it exposes truths behind a “made-up glorious past” of modern South Asia, and it also provides some justice to the real victims (or survivors and heroes as she prefers to call them) of the Bangladesh War of Liberation of 1971, namely women who were raped, tortured, and then marginalized (x). Drawing on gender narratives of the war, Saikia analyzes the recent history of the region from a new perspective and attempts to redefine the meanings that the states involved—Bangladesh, Pakistan and India—created around the war of 1971. In order to write a people’s history of the region, her multisided methodology relies on oral history, the scholarly literatures on memory and Holocaust and gender studies, and on archival materials, most of which are usually difficult to access.

Rape and war, for the most part, have always gone hand-in-hand; it has been part of conventional wartime violence, one that specifically targets women, even though, in the aftermath of war, none of the combatants—victorious or defeated—likes to give an honest account of these incidents in their historiography. Repercussions of this gender violence are so deep that they not only cripple the victims, as Saikia meticulously points out, but also endanger the very sense of justice and humanity in a society. With her detailed account of gender violence that women of various ethnic and religious backgrounds experienced during the war of 1971, she articulately illustrates how states and societies have dealt with the outcomes of these deplorable incidents, how such outcomes have affected the fates of the victims, and what the implications have been for the future that these societies have the potential to build for themselves. As part of her critique, Saikia recommends that societies involved in such atrocities need to resort to a cultural and religious principle, insaniyet (a shared sense of humanity), to resettle unresolved grievances and liberate women from this undue burden as both victims and representations of victimhood. The survivors repeatedly brought up insaniyet, or the loss of it, during their interviews to explain the reasons for and to give a meaning to the violence to which they were subjected.

Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh is divided into three parts. In the first part, Saikia addresses the theoretical and methodological issues concerning her study and a wide range of other topics such as the commonality of violence and women’s agency with regard both to the violence during the war and to settling wartime disputes between nations and societies. The second part of the book is its heart, presenting the experiences of women from a multidimensional perspective, not only as victims but also as caregivers and fighters during the war. The diversity of these women’s roles informed, for Saikia, the complexity of women’s agency in war, especially given various nationalists’ attempts to present and define women and their role in certain, narrow ways. The final part of the book consists of the testimonies of Pakistani and Bangladeshi soldiers; it is an interesting addition to the whole project, providing the views and feelings of the perpetrators, which ranged from a complete sense of guilt to utter indifference.

Saikia’s book is a groundbreaking study for several reasons. First of all, it challenges the one-sided and nationalist historiographies of South Asian states. Secondly, it uses a multitude of sources that have not been explored thus far. Thirdly, framing the study from the perspective of insaniyet shifts focus onto the female victims and their role in the aftermath of war and away from more traditional perspectives that look for reasons for violence or seek to blame one or the other side for the brutality. And finally, her most important contribution is that she clearly demonstrates that “no single group had...